Heather Waldorf is a full-time counsellor at a North York group home for adults with developmental disabilities. She earned her B.A. in fine arts studies at York University and her B.E.d. in adult education at Brock. She wrote the first draft of Grist during a coast-to-coast camping trip. This is her second YA novel, after Fighting the Current, which came out in 2005. A short story, "Jaws Goes Moose Hunting," was published in Transition magazine in 2005.